Kerbal Space Program gets a NASA-backed asteroid wranging expansion

Kerbal Space Program is widely acknowledged to be both the most detailed and adorable space simulation game of all time. In it, you direct a cadre of cute aliens to design, launch, and operate spacecraft — and it’s wickedly difficult. Though it is in fact a simplified version of real rocket science, it still tasks players with taking real physical phenomena into account, planning their missions the way real NASA engineers do, and dealing with defeat after wonderful, educational defeat.

So, NASA might have something of a self-interested reason for supporting the next Kerbal expansion, which will have thousands of dedicated players attempting to capture and land on an asteroid — just as NASA will be doing for the next several years.

Called Asteroid Redirect Mission, the new mission will be one of Kerbal‘s most challenging and dangerous yet. Just like the real scientists, players will have to identify a suitable candidate asteroid before designing and launching your capture mission. Once the asteroid has been successfully “wrangled” into a stable orbit, analysis can begin (and the mission can be won). The downloadable expansion will include this asteroid mission as well as numerous new ship parts, including a robot grappler and the largest fuel tanks so far. This will almost certainly interface with the upcoming KerbalEdu project, which looks to put the compelling physics simulation into schools.

Landing on the surface of another world used to be enough to impress people!

From NASA’s perspective, this is an easy deal to make. Not only does Asteroid Redirect Mission effectively work as promotion for their real objectives, it could also inspire the next generation of astrophysicists by bringing them much, much closer to the real-world impacts of the science technology. A teen who watches NASA grab and control a real asteroid might feel more connected to that event if they can remember performing the same operation themselves — and even more-so if they secretly believe their design could have worked better than NASA’s. Interactive media like video-games have a unique ability to produce that sort of familiarity, which could pay off for NASA a few doctorates’ worth of time from now.

Still, one wonders if NASA has thought through the implications of allowing mission after NASA-styled mission to fail, often disastrously. Seeing such failures does not instill the sort of trust that we simply must have in technology companies. There’s a reason car manufacturers often shy away from putting their product in racing games with detailed crash models. Still, unlike car manufacturers with an interest in making you forget that driving is dangerous, NASA has never shied away from admitting the danger of its activities. In fact, the intrepid nature of space flight is one big source of its romantic appeal.

That should be fine if all goes well on NASA’s actual mission — but if they lose an astronaut in space, the happy-go-lucky aliens who simulated their accident might not seem so cute any more. That’s no reason to keep this incredible educational tool (and fun gaming experience) from people’s hands of course, but it could lead NASA to wish that its support had been more spiritual than officially branded.